Switzerland, Assisted Suicide and Death Clinics.

A journal article on a pilot study concerning assisted suicide in Switzerland has resulted in significant media promotion of the legalization of assisted suicide. Assisted suicide causes the death of people and the issue deserves further investigating concerning its actual practice in Switzerland.

In April 2013, Pietro D'Amico, a 62-year-old magistrate from Calabria in southern Italy died by assisted suicide at Dignitas. An article that was published in Switzerland's english news service, The Local, stated:

The father-of-one took the decision after a wrong diagnosis from Italian and Swiss doctors, his family's lawyer Michele Roccisano told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

An autopsy carried out by the University of Basel's Institute of Forensic Medicine found that D'Amico was not suffering from a life-threatening illness at the time of his death.

Roccisano has called on the Italian and Swiss authorities to examine D'Amico's medical records to determine what went wrong.

On April 23, 2014, a Swiss appeals court overturned a regional court conviction for a doctor who assisted a suicide of a man without a diagnosis.

A study published in the Journal of Epidemiology examined 1301 assisted suicide deaths in Switzerland and found that:

Women, highly educated, divorced and rich people are more likely to die from assisted suicide, new research has revealed and around 16 per cent of death certificates did not register an underlying cause. In other words, they had no underlying illness.

A previous study of suicides by two right-to-die organizations showed that 25 per cent of those assisted had no fatal illness, instead citing 'weariness of life' as a factor.

The most recent study titled: Suicide tourism: a pilot study on the Swiss phenomenon examines the assisted suicide deaths of suicide tourists who died at the Dignitas suicide clinic. This study appears to promote the legalization of assisted suicide in countries that suicide tourists most often originate from. This study admits that Switzerland lacks any effective controls of its suicide business and it acknowledges that there is an increasing number of deaths by non-terminal suicide tourists.

The Dignitas suicide clinic has been connected to several other controversies including:

Assisted suicide involves one person being directly and intentionally involved with causing the death of another person. The media needs to be reporting on it for what it is, rather than for what they want it to be.